If Anti-Liberal is right then I stand corrected as to the most popular vehicles. My other points should still hold, however.
And Anti-Liberal makes a very good point about natural resources. There are more acres of trees planted in the U.S. now than ever before – mostly because of property rights (read up on the tragedy of the commons to see why property rights are the best defense against over-harvesting natural resources).
AUSTRALIA: Possibly highest greenhouse gas emissions in the world
A study of greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions by the world’s industrialised countries has shown that Australia, not the USA, contributes most to global warming per capita.
Analysis has shown that Australia contributes 25% more to climate change on a per capita basis than the next most polluting country, the USA.
At 26.7 tonnes of ghg emissions per person, Australia contributes “twice the average level for all other industrialised countries”, according to the study.
“While the USA has higher emissions per capita from energy (20.6 tonnes compared to Australia’s 17.6 tonnes), Australia has much higher levels of emissions from agriculture and land-use change,” concludes the study.
Excerpted from: http://www.edie.net/news/Archive/1948.html
There is a lot we can do and probably a lot we will do. Europe is ahead of us for one simple reason, they’ve lived there longer and exhausted the easy methods long ago. They have better and more mass transit and make better use of rail for freight. I did notice quite a few more smokestacks in places like Dortmund and Bochum in Germany than I saw anywhere in the US in a long time, but in Copenhagen I saw more wind energy plants than I ever have anywhere.
I don’t own any small cars. My vehicles are trucks. I have two, one with a 7300 CC diesel and the other with a 6900 CC diesel. My wife and I operate a horse training facility and you just can’t drag horses around hilly country with a smaller engine. In Europe they do it if they are only hauling one or two horses but I have to haul four at time very frequently. Now days the business is changing and I don’t need the older truck as much so fairly soon I’ll get a small car. I’ll most likely always have one big truck though.